The 18-year-old high school senior in Thornwood, N.Y., said she spent about $780 on 12 applications after mailings from top schools. But she was rejected from Duke, Columbia and Cornell University, and plans to attend the University of Maryland.

"I thought, 'Oh my gosh, someone is interested in me,' " Ederer said. "They attract you with an e-mail and a few pamphlets and big envelopes filled with a ton of information and make you want to go to that school, and they don't accept you."

The deluge of correspondence from even the most hard-to-get-into colleges is raising false expectations among thousands of students, swelling school coffers with application fees as high as $90 apiece and making colleges seem more selective by soliciting and then rejecting applicants. College applications are soaring even as the number of high school graduates fell 2.2 percent this year from a peak in 2007-08, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

"The overwhelming majority of students receiving these mailings will not be admitted in the end, and Harvard knows this well," said Reider, a former admissions officer at Stanford University.

Consumer groups said that the nonprofit College Board, which owns the SAT college admission test, and its nonprofit rival, ACT Inc., are making money by selling personal details about teenagers. The companies collect information on millions of test takers, and both sell names and information to colleges at 33 cents a name.

Harvard, which accepted a record low 6.2 percent of applicants this year, markets to high school students because it wants to find the most talented class, said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. The school informs students "it's a highly competitive process," he said.

"There are so many students out there in the world who might not automatically think about Harvard as a place to go," said Fitzsimmons. Harvard received almost 35,000 applications this year, a record. "The odds of reaching the top of anything are not good, but is that a reason not to try?"

Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are scaling back their marketing, saying they don't want to encourage kids who likely won't be accepted. Yale, which admitted 7.4 percent of applicants this year, cut its mailings by a third since 2005, to 80,000, said Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions.

"I feel obligated to be reasonable in recruiting so we're not creating unrealistic expectations of applicants," Brenzel said.